Companies have long made strategic and investment decisions by investing in the collection and analysis of internal data streams. Typical internal data streams, such as those seen in a normal customer relationship management system, include customer order history, customer service history, sales forecasts, marketing campaign results, and supply chain/operating data. The fundamental use of this data is to measure an organization's profitability with a customer or set of customers.
While this type of data is commercially focused, and has been sufficient in the past, in today's markets this type of knowledge is simply the cost of doing business. As competition intensifies with the introduction of so much readily available information, the ability for organizations to differentiate will become more difficult. In today's markets, an organization's ability to differentiate will require a deep understanding of how their investments and strategies impact their bottom line as well as their customer's bottom line. Data streams that are internally-focused on the economics of the company, not on the economics of the company's customers, are missing an entire dimension when evaluating their competitiveness. Organizations that can add data streams in a systemic fashion along the dimension of understanding their role in a customer's profitability will be able to align their investments and strategies around the economics of their customers, not their own, and succeed in the future.
In recent years the market has seen an influx of “Voice of Customer” firms and methodologies that use surveys to collect customer information to better understand their services. This type of data is typically collected during single-focus projects, and creates silos of data that are not easily integrated into the organization, acted upon, and measured on an ongoing and systemic basis. In addition, existing ‘Voice of Customer’ firms and methodologies focus on qualitative and relative indices such as customer satisfaction or preference that is inherently difficult to quantify the economic benefit a customer receives as a result of an organization's investments or strategies. Finally, existing ‘Voice of Customer’ firms and methodologies are built for the execution by advanced degree subject matter experts, in turn creating a dependency on these high cost individuals for the data stream.